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Scala programming language roadmap

About a month after the latest major language release, version 2.8, Martin Odersky, the creator of the Scala programming language has presented a roadmap of the project's plans for the coming few months.

A first bug fix release for the current version, 2.8, is planned in September or October. The need for a bug fix release is seen as important, as more than half of the project's participants have either, already migrated their projects to the current version, or plan to do so shortly, despite that version not being fully compatible with its predecessor. This conclusion is drawn from the results of a survey the Scala developers conducted on their web site.

In version 2.9, which could potentially be released at the end of the year, Odersky has promised to add new libraries. One major addition will, for instance, include parallel collection classes which can make better use of multi-core processors. Parallel computing will play a major role in the overhaul for the forthcoming version of Scala. This is hardly surprising because the language, being a mixture of object-oriented and functional programming styles, generally lends itself to this approach.

The Scala programming language was developed at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and its popularity is steadily increasing. It integrates well into Java and into the .NET platform, compiles to Java or .NET byte codes, and is a general purpose language, capable of all tasks that would otherwise be programmed in Java or C#.